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BYO Cloud. Not since the Romans stretched the vela around the Coliseum has there been such a radical solution for stadium shading. Qatar plans to create man-made clouds (“a lightweight carbon structure carrying a giant envelope of material containing helium gas”) to float over the stadium where the World Cup will be held in the summer of 2022. More details in The Daily Mail.

Fatal attraction? Why do we live in dangerous places? Scientific American investigates their allure and the ecological consequences–good and bad–for both plant and animal life.

ESI 2 DC. The Washington Post reports that President Obama has tapped New York’s own Edwin Schlossberg, founder of the interactive design firm ESI, to serve on a federal panel that helps oversee the architecture and design of the nation’s capital. (Schlossberg is the more designer-y half of Caroline Kennedy and also one of the founders of the not-for-profit desigNYC.)

More rigor, less speed. At Slate,Witold Rybczynski makes the case for slow architecture: “No wonder that Renaissance architectural treatises often seem cerebral; architects spent a lot of time thinking before they started drawing.”